James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Oral sex?” Hackberry said. “Yes,” she replied. “He said he had a friend in Texas who used to hang out in this particular brothel. The friend owned a nightclub in Texas.”

“ La Rosa Blanca? The White Rose?” Hackberry said.

“Pardon?” she said.

“Bingo,” Pam said.

The orange neon sign on the roof of Joe Tex’s saloon glowed against a turquoise sky that was bottom-rimmed in the west by strips of red and black clouds. The evening could not have been more beautiful. The wind was balmy and out of the south and smelled of distant rain. An obsolete windmill was clattering by an abandoned loading pen on the hardpan, like a beneficent reminder of a grand tradition as well as the potential the land held for all those who lived humbly upon it. Even the tractor-trailers wending their way down the two-lane through compacted hills that resembled ant mounds seemed like a testimony to the industrial success of a new nation rather than harbingers of pollution and the loss of Jefferson’s agrarian vision.

There were few patrons in the saloon when Hackberry and Pam entered through the front door. Joe Tex was stocking his beer cooler behind the bar; Rosanne Cash was singing on the jukebox; the lacquered pine logs in the walls seemed to exude a golden light like warm honey. Joe Tex was smiling when he lifted his head from his work, his hair as shiny and black as a raven’s feathers, his rolled shirtsleeves exposing his vascular arms. “My favorite sheriff and lady deputy,” he said. “What are y’all having?” He propped his arms on the bar, waiting. The top of his white cowboy shirt was unsnapped, and his chest hair was fanned out on his skin like the points of a star. His eyes were so lidless in their intensity that he seemed incapable of blinking.

“Your name has come up in an investigation, Joe,” Hackberry said, setting his hat crown-down on the bar. “Not that you did anything wrong. We just thought you could help us figure out a thing or two.”

“Who was the shooter on the grassy knoll?” Joe Tex said.

“No, it has to do with the name of your saloon,” Hackberry said.

“I remember now. Lime and soda and ice, right?” Joe Tex said. “How about you, Miss Pam?”

“Who was the White Rose?” she asked.

“My wife. She was a stripper in Big D. She actually worked in Jack Ruby’s old joint.”

“We did some checking on that, Joe,” Hackberry said. “Nobody can find any record of your being married.”

“I guess that’s their problem. My wife and I got hitched at a drive-by window in Matamoros.”

“I heard you might have done some quasi-governmental work in Cambodia,” Hackberry said.

“I’m not big on revisiting the past, Sheriff. I was a GI on the Mekong River. It took me to lots of places, most of them better forgotten.”

“You fly in and out of the Golden Triangle at all?” Hackberry asked.

“I don’t remember. I have a bunch of big blank holes in my memory when it comes to Indochina. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’m not ashamed of anything I did over there.”

“I’m not questioning your service to your country,” Hackberry said. “I’m interested in a man by the name of Josef Sholokoff. A man who works for him helped torture a local woman and maybe crucify Cody Daniels. That man was in the company of a guy who knows you, Joe. He used the name of your saloon. He used to deliver exotic animals to game farms. Does that ring any bells?”

“I guess I’m tone-deaf on that one.”

“The White Rose was a whorehouse in Phnom Penh, right?” Hackberry said.

“Could be. Cherry Alley wasn’t an open-air fruit market in Tokyo. But that doesn’t mean I went there to find out. I got to get back to work.”

“What you need to do is take the shit out of your mouth,” Pam said. “I pulled Cody Daniels’s feet and hands off the nails someone used to hang him on a cross inside a burning building. He was alive when his killers started the fire. With good luck, he died of smoke inhalation.”

“I saw it on the news. You think something like that is lost on me? Years ago I knew some intelligence people. But I don’t remember anything about some guy who hauled exotic animals around. Unless y’all got a warrant, get out of my establishment.”

“You got a meth problem, Joe?” Hackberry said.

Joe Texas leaned across the bar. His skin was so dark that in the shadows, it looked like it had been removed from a tannery and kneaded and softened and fitted on his bones; his eyes stared out of the sockets like those of a man living inside a costume. “You don’t have a clue about what you’re dealing with,” he said. “You want to end up a bump out there in the desert? Just keep fucking with the wrong people. You’ll wish you were still drunk and humping underage Mexican whores, Sheriff. Y’all aren’t the only people with access to security files. Get a warrant. In the meantime, I’m D-D-D. That stands for ‘deaf, dumb, and don’t know.’”

That night Hackberry went out to his barn and clicked on the interior lights. The row of bulbs on the ceiling glowed with a chemical-like iridescence inside the humidity. Bales of green hay bound with red twine were scattered on the concrete pad that extended between the stalls located on either side of the building, and a speed bag and an Everlast rebound board were mounted on the back wall of the rear stall. Hackberry’s barn was not a bad refuge from the cares of the world. He began hitting the bag with a rotating motion, landing each blow on the heel of his fist, thudding the bag up into the circular rebound board before it could swing full-out on its cable, increasing his velocity until the bag became a blur, the rhythm as steady and loud as a drumroll.

But he could not clean Joe Tex’s words out of his head. Hackberry had made no secret of his life as a drunk and an adulterer and a frequenter of brothels in northern Mexico. The age of the prostitutes had seemed insignificant at the time, as callous as that sounded. In daylight he would not have recognized most of them. Sometimes he went into a blackout, and when he woke sick and hungover in the morning, the only knowledge he had of the previous night came from his empty wallet and the mileage on his odometer. He suspected that the women or teenage girls who touched his body had done so with indifference if not with revulsion. The odium was his, not theirs. The man with a sprawling ranch and a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart hidden away in a seabag, the man who drove a Cadillac with fins and who had a law degree from Baylor, was the sybaritic visitor to a row of shanties built along an open sewage canal. Shame and dishonor were his flags, and self-loathing was his constant companion. His presence or his absence in the life of these girls or women was as significant as a hangnail they might clip off and drop outside into a waste bucket.

Even knowing these things, he had repeated the same behavior over and over and hadn’t bothered to question himself about a form of immorality that went far beyond his unfaithfulness to Verisa, who’d had at least two affairs that he knew of, one with a banker in Victoria and one with an airline pilot who’d flown an F-86 in Korea. In Hackberry’s mind, his greater sin was his sexual exploitation of girls and women who had no choice in the world. There was no way to excuse or rationalize his callousness toward the deprivation and sadness that constituted their lives. The fact that his behavior was documented in a security file was of no concern to him. The fact that a man like Joe Tex could have access to it and taunt him with it was.

He hit the bag one last time with the back of his fist and walked to the front of the barn and flicked on the outside flood lamp. His two foxtrotters were watching him from the far side of their water tank. “What are you guys up to?” he said.